When will I learn?

 It doesn’t pay sometimes to re-read books even when those books were penned by a favorite author. 

I am, for example, a huge fan of John Sandford’s writing. It’s quite possible I’ve read every work of fiction he’s published. Sandford is one of those rare authors where I’m even willing to suppress my distaste for crowds and get in line for book signings or a scheduled talk at a book festival. (The Younger Daughter said she didn’t realize authors had groupies until she saw me mesmerized by Sandford at the Tucson Book Festival a couple years ago. She likes Sandford’s books, too, but apparently not quite as much as her mother.)

I like Sandford because besides being a great story teller he gets stuff right. He does actual research. When he describes one of his characters speeding to a crime scene in Minnesota, he’s accurate in how long it takes to get from someplace like Marshall to up by Ely. His descriptions of topography are spot-on, too. No weirdness that can knock you out of being focused on the story to thinking, “What the. . .? That’s would be a 4 hour drive under ideal conditions. Why does the author describe him as doing it in 20 minutes?” I loved Tony Hillerman’s books, but have to admit his compressing a hundred-plus miles on the Navajo nation into trips you could do in no time at all annoyed the crap out of me. Even when a person is reading fiction, the reader wants to the background to feel right.

Which brings me to the latest revelation that one of my idols isn’t perfect. I hit kind of a dry spell for reading material and decided to re-read the first book in Sandford’s Virgil Flowers series, Dark of the Moon. First thing that hits me is a continuity error. I want to know exactly when Virgil’s father switched denominations. In later books in the series, Virgil’s minister father is Lutheran. In Dark of the Moon he’s Presbyterian.

Okay, minor point. As the series progressed Sandford probably unconsciously decided that Lutheran made more sense in thoroughly Scandinavian Minnesota, which we all know is full of Norwegian bachelor farmers and church suppers at which dual purpose Jello™ molds (if there’s Cool Whip™ it’s a dessert; if there’s Miracle Whip™ it’s a salad) dominate the menu. Pastor Flowers is a minor character, a side note in the series overall scheme of things, so Sandford’s copy editor didn’t catch it in subsequent works. No big deal.

And then another character’s name caught my eye, and I cannot unsee it. I have groused in the past about writers and their weirdness in naming their fictional people. Terry Brooks and the Shanarra chronicles full of people who sound like diseases or other health conditions (I’m still surprised none of his characters were named Dysmenorrhea), William Krueger looking at maps of Minnesota and coming up with gems like Marais Grand.

So what did Sandford do? No doubt he was drawing a blank, had another detective he had to slap a name on, and nothing was coming to him. And then he looked down at the keyboard.

Del Capslock.

Okay, so on most keyboards it’s CAPSLK, but we all know what the inspiration was. What can we expect next? Paige Down? Con Troll? 

The mind boggles. . .

John Sandford planted an ear worm

Ever since I finished reading Easy Prey this song has been going through my head. Definitely not my usual reaction to one of Sandford's books.

Another of life's little mysteries

I recently finished reading The Prophetess by Barbara Wood. It has a relatively familiar plot line: an archaeologist discovers half a dozen scrolls dating from the early Christian era that apparently contain information about Jesus and his followers that might contradict current church dogma. Almost immediately, she finds herself on the run and fearing for her life. It turns out she's actually running, sort of, from two sets of villains: an insane billionaire* who's obsessed with adding to his secret collection of rare artifacts and documents and the 20th century version of the Catholic Inquisition. The Vatican wants to suppress anything that suggests women were ever considered equal with men in the early church. The billionaire wants the archaeologist eliminated and the scrolls in his possession to be kept secret indefinitely; the church wants the archaeologist discredited and the scrolls buried in a Vatican archive. In either case, the information on the scrolls is to be suppressed.

By coincidence, earlier this year I read Laurie R. King's A Letter of Mary. It has a similar theme: an ancient document is found that suggests long-held assumptions and beliefs about the early Christian church are wrong, that women actually were much more important than current dogma teaches, and that women were among the apostles -- it wasn't exclusively a boys' club. A Letter of Mary is a better book than The Prophetess, possibly because King is a better writer than Wood, but The Prophetess is definitely readable. Both books came out in 1996, both sold reasonably well, but I don't recall either turning into a mega best seller. In any case, reading two books with similar themes fairly close together got me to thinking about a third book that mined that same vein of speculative ore.

In 2003 a piece of clumsily written crap titled The Da Vinci Code hit the bookstores. The book was so awkwardly written I had trouble reading it. Similar plot line: clues suggest that stuff the established church teaches as fundamental truths aren't actually quite so true after all, that maybe, just maybe Jesus had a wife (a theme explored much more competently in The Last Temptation of Christ back in 1955), and all sorts of melodrama ensues. So why did The Da Vinci Code resonate so much with the public that it turned into a cultural phenomenon when at least two earlier and better novels never struck the same chord? Marketing? Dan Brown had a better publicist? Sheer dumb luck?

Questions like this are one reason I'm glad I've never relied on writing fiction as a way to make a living. Brilliant novels languish in remainder bins while the authors survive with day jobs at Burger King; clunkily written drivel attracts movie options and climbs the best seller lists.  It's  a mystery.

*The insane billionaire's company bears a strong resemblance to Microsoft. If you ever wanted to see Bill Gates portrayed as a psychotic cannibal, read The Prophetess.

Life (and death) in a delusional bubble

I've been reading The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II. Nicholas was the last of the Romanov tsars to rule Russia. Except it's pretty clear that in a lot of ways he never did rule the country; he and his immediate family existed in a lovely bubble and were pretty much out of touch with any sort of reality.

I'm into the section of the book now where Nicholas and his family have been exiled to Siberia and are living under house arrest. They're only a few months away from being executed, but they're all cruising along as though everything is going to be fine. One indignity after another, more and more things stripped from them, and they still don't get it that they're heading down the same road as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. They're given opportunities to flee the country, to go live in exile, sponge off some of their numerous royal relatives scattered around Europe, but they refuse to leave Russia. It's bizarre. I can halfway understand why Nicholas would decide to stay in Russia -- he really bought into the notion that the tsar was Russia -- but why didn't he try to get his kids or his lunatic wife out of the the country? He was reading the papers; he knew about the riots and social disorder. Did he really believe that because he had abdicated, they were now safe?

Then again, considering that he'd spent his entire life being passive, maybe it's not so surprising "Nicky" just sat back and waited for events to happen. Most of the time he was tsar he was pretty much oblivious to what was actually happening in the country or being done in his name. On the rare occasions when he actually asserted his authority, it usually wasn't his idea -- it was his wife's. And his wife was, to put it mildly, delusional. She was even more out of touch with reality than Nicky was.

And what were the underlying reasons for their happy, delusional life? There were actually two things. One was the Tsarina Alexandra. Nicholas and Alexander were that rare royal couple: they'd married for love against the wishes of various relatives, including Nicky's parents. They'd met as teenagers, Nicholas had fallen for Alexandra at first sight, and never gave up on the idea that someday they'd marry. His parents had consented only because they'd figured out that Nicholas wasn't going to agree to any other arrangements. His father had even tried the classic Russian aristocratic technique of hooking his son up with a ballet dancer in the hopes that he'd become sufficiently enamored of his mistress that he wouldn't care who his legal wife was -- it didn't work. Once Nicholas and Alexandra were married, they formed a self-sufficient bubble. This might not have been a problem if Alexandra hadn't been quite so insecure. She was easily offended and good at holding grudges. Nicky adored Alix so refused to do anything that might upset her. End result? Their social circle kept shrinking until it consisted of a handful of people who would tell the Empress only what she wanted to hear. If someone tried to insert an unpleasant truth, they'd find themselves cut off.

The other reason was religion. The tsar's only son, the heir to the throne, had hemophilia. The condition was diagnosed when Alexei was an infant. Alexandra's life became basically a search for a miracle cure. She absolutely refused to admit that her son had what was a terminal condition, that no matter how careful they were or how intensely she prayed, Alexei was not going to live long enough to be Tsar. It's not surprising that she fell for the lies told by Grigory Rasputin, a con man who was remarkably adept at telling Alexandra exactly what she wanted to hear. As anyone who's ever read any Russian history knows, Rasputin's influence on the royal family became widely known and despised. At the same time, articles and political cartoons in the newspapers openly suggested scandalous behavior -- Rasputin's public behavior away from the palace was, in a word, debauched so it was easy for ordinary people to believe the worst of the rumors circulating about the tsarina. Naturally, the worse Rasputin behaved away from the royal family, the less Alexandra was willing to believe she was being conned. Even when stories reached her about virtually public orgies, she just said this was proof of his holiness. Apparently there's a long Russian tradition of holy men indulging in remarkably outrageous ways and it somehow serving as proof not that they're perverts or degenerates but are instead especially blessed by God. I know -- it makes no sense, but Alexandra 's surviving letters and journals confirm that she believed it.

And then when you throw in World War I, the fact the Russians were getting slaughtered by the Germans, and Alexandra was a German princess who tried to meddle in politics by writing privately to her cousins? It didn't take many years of warfare and Russian losses for most of the country to believe Alexandra was a German spy and the tsar himself was betraying his country by not locking her up. I guess the biggest mystery when it comes to the last of the Romanovs isn't so much how they happened to end up lined up and shot in a basement, but why it took until the Bolshevik Revolution for it to happen. By the time Nicholas abdicated in 1917, he and Alexandra were so universally hated that it's moderately amazing they survived as long as they did.

One thing I have always wondered about, though, is why the Reds felt the need to execute the grand duchesses -- the tsar's daughters. They had no rights of succession; the throne followed the male line. No one was going to rouse the populace by saying "Let's put Princess Olga on the throne." Then again, fanatics have always had a problem with overkill -- and the Bolshevik leadership definitely qualified as fanatics.

As I was reading this book, I found myself thinking about how easy it is for people in leadership positions to fall into the same trap Nicholas II did: just listen to the happy news, chase away anyone who tries to do a reality check, and then find themselves wondering why their company is going bankrupt or their favorite policies are failing. The sad thing is that there probably is no good cure for the problem: the more powerful a person becomes, the less willing other people are to tell them the unvarnished truth.

So would I recommend Nicholas II to other readers? I'm not sure. It's probably a good one for anyone interested in Russian history -- the author does look at various events from a different perspective than I'd read before -- but the structure of the book is odd. It felt choppy and tended to be a little hard to follow. For someone with only a casual interest, though, it's not a good choice.

Pulitzer Project: The Town

Like most of the books I've read as part of my Pulitzer project, The Town was a book I'd never heard of written by an author whose name sounded vaguely familiar but with whose work I was completely unfamiliar. I had a faint recollection of having seen books by Conrad Richter on library shelves but I was reasonably sure I'd never read any of them. If The Town is typical of his work, I may be feeling relieved.

That's actually an odd thing to say because The Town was definitely readable. I picked it up at the library on Tuesday and finished it last night: three evenings' worth of reading comes close to dropping into mind candy territory. Unlike some of the other "classics" I've had to struggle through, The Town did not feel like work. It just felt . . . lame.

I'll explain, but first a brief overview of the book. The Town is the final installment in a trilogy that included The Trees and The Fields. The three books chronicle the lives of a pioneer family that left the eastern United States at about the time of the American Revolution and settled in Ohio. The first book apparently details their arrival in the wilderness, the second one gets into their efforts at farming, and by book three civilization has arrived. The little settlement that began with just one family progresses from being a village to a town to an actual city and the county seat. The Town is told through the perspective of three members of the Wheeler family: Sayward Wheeler, the middle-aged wife of an attorney (Portius Wheeler), their youngest child, Chancey Wheeler, and Rosa Tench, the illegitimate daughter of Portius Wheeler. Chancey and Rosa are approximately the same age. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination for the reader to figure out where that particular story line is going to lead, especially when neither child seems to be particularly grounded in reality. There's a lot of tiptoeing around and dropping of various hints, but no adult seems to have brains enough to simply say in plain English, hey, young idiots, you're brother and sister. Naturally, by the time anyone does come right out and tell them why they shouldn't be hanging out together and acting like they're courting, the damage has been done and the inevitable tragedy results.

Of course, if anyone had bothered to be blunt with Chancey and Rosa when they were still young, the book would have been a lot shorter.

In addition to spending multiple chapters hinting at the risk of an incestuous love affair, the book looks at life from the perspective of Sayward Wheeler, the self-styled "woodsy" girl who likes to think of herself as a simple pioneer but ends up being the richest person in town as well as mother of the governor of the state. She's annoyed when her husband talks her into selling off pieces of the farmland she inherited from her parents so that the town can grow and a canal can be built, and she's also annoyed when Portius insists they build a good brick house and move out of the simple log cabin she'd spent most of her life in. When the book begins, Sayward has hit menopause. She's borne nine children and, at the ancient age of approximately 40, is wondering if she's going to live long enough to see her youngest and frailest son, Chancey, survive past childhood. She does, of course. She doesn't die until the eve of the Civil War. Along the way she finds her sister who had been lost in the woods decades earlier and had been presumed dead, sees one of her daughters end up married to an English aristocrat, and watches most of her other children grow up to be successful adults who marry and provide her with grandchildren.

Conrad Richter reportedly engaged in exhaustive research while writing this book and the others in the trilogy. He reviewed hundreds of documents to get a sense for the speech patterns and dialects of the early 19th century. His work has been praised for the accuracy of its portrayals of frontier life and folkways.

So why, if the book was well-researched and decently written, was I left with an overall impression of "meh"? Maybe it was the totally cliched incest subplot. Maybe it was the folksy way Sayward expressed herself -- maybe it was accurate, but it also came across as twee. Not as bad as some books that lay the colorful dialect on with a trowel, but still not quite believable. It was just a tad too cute. Or maybe it was all the weird names too many of the characters have. Did people back in early 19th century Ohio really pick names every bit as odd as some of the brain-dead names we see today? A couple of the Wheeler kids have normal names but "Sooth" and "Dezia" aren't among them. I can accept that some names were just misspelled versions of common names -- Jary instead of Gerry or Jerry, for example -- but there are limits.

Okay. Where do I rank this one? Right in the middle of the pack. It didn't stink, it was quite readable, and it wasn't work. On the other hand, it also didn't particularly impress me. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's probably a 5. Would I recommend it to other readers? Not really. I'd have to throw in a bunch of qualifiers. You know, "It's easy reading but it's too cliched." "It's easy reading but the characters aren't really believable." Etc.

Next up on the list: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk. That is a book I have heard of. In fact, the book is so well-known that I was sure the L'Anse Public Library would have it in its collection. Nope. All those Danielle Steeles must take up too much shelf space because this is still another novel I have to order through Interlibrary Loan. I am happy to have a local public library, but, holy wah, there's a lot of low quality dreck taking up way too much space on its shelves.

A genre to avoid

Mystery/romance. Or romance/mystery. I'm not sure just what to call a genre that crosses Harlequins with what is supposed to be a thriller, but apparently it's a genre that is Carla Neggers's forte. Too bad she is, at best, a thoroughly mediocre writer.

I just finished a book called Cold Pursuit. It's apparently the first in a trilogy of books about a female Secret Service agent and her love interest, a former Special Forces soldier. I assume it's a trilogy because the L'Anse Public Library tries to label books that are part of a series, and when I plucked this gem off the shelf it had a number 1 label on the spine. The next two books on the shelf were marked 2 and 3 so it's probably safe to assume that agent Jo Harper and ex-Sgt. Cameron will continue to have hot and steamy sex while investigating a suspected ring of international assassins that for some bizarre reason are apparently based in rural Vermont. 

You know, I am continually being surprised by the places that I find lady porn. What I can't help but think of as the Jean Auel model keeps popping up all over the place. I call it the Jean Auel model because, so far as I can recall, Clan of the Cave Bear is the first place I encountered the formula: a certain number of pages of narrative to move the plot forward, then a couple pages of hot hetero sex, then back to so many pages of narrative, more hot hetero sex scenes, all tastefully written but making it pretty damn clear what was happening, then more narrative. It took awhile to get going in the first book in the series, but after that it was pretty much guaranteed that every 70 pages or so Jondalar was going down on Ayla. Apparently Cro-Magnans were big making women happy with lots of cunnilingus, "worshipping the goddess" so to speak, because Ayla seemed to be on the receiving end a lot more than Jondalar was. Auel really knew how to tap into women's fantasies.

Anyway, since then the lady porn has evolved. It's gone from being tasteful and intermittent in fiction targeting women to being basically the whole book (e.g., 50 Shades of Gray). It's also gone from euphemistic to blunt (in the Outlander series Claire Beacham wraps her hand around Jamie Fraser's cock and describes the organ in affectionate detail; she doesn't just admire his manhood). Cold Pursuit falls kind in the middle on the descriptive scale -- lots of "plunging" that makes intercourse sound a lot like trying to fix a stopped up sink drain -- which could be one reason it felt so much like a Harlequin.

Now, I know that there are a lot of "mysteries" out there that fall into mutant genres, too. Janet Evanovich's books all mix romance, mystery, and humor. J. D. Robb (aka Nora Roberts) mixes romance, mystery, and science fiction. Laurel K. Hamilton mixes horror, romance, and mystery, although the biggest mystery with her Anita Blake series is why Anita is still capable of walking after banging half the population of the western hemisphere. Some are more readable than others. So why have I singled out Neggers? I have no clue. Maybe it's because after I finished the book I found myself thinking, well, there went another 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back.  Maybe it was because the attempt to blend two different themes (romance and mystery) was so clumsily done.It felt like she wrote two separate books and then did some cutting and pasting to merge the two. And maybe it's because it's Sunday morning, I'm  bored, and I don't feel like doing anything more productive than whine about mediocre books.  

It's a mystery.

Broken vows

Over the years I've made a number of promises to myself, usually about reading choices. Authors who insist on writing in dialect generally annoy the heck out of me, so I keep saying I won't read books that contain a lot of dialect or attempts at mimicking a regional accent. Authors who turn pets into characters or (even worse) have the pets serve as narrators also annoy me. I've spent many years avoiding books where you get to see what the cat or the dog or some other critter is thinking. The whole concept of seeing anything through the dog's eyes struck me as being way too twee for my taste.

As for dialect, in my many years of reading, I can think of exactly one book where the author did such a smooth job with writing dialect that it felt natural rather than affected -- Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin. In every other example I can recall, attempts at the local dialect come across as stilted, unbelievable, condescending, distracting, or all of the above. Thus, one of my other promises to myself as a reader is that once I've seen that an author has a weakness for writing in dialect I'll avoid that author's work in the future.

In the past two weeks I managed to break both of those promises to myself. First, I made the mistake of reading a second Joseph Heywood book: Running Dark. My only excuse is that I knew Heywood sets his mysteries in the Upper Peninsula (his protagonist, Grady Service, is a Department of Natural Resources conservation officer). I had read one book in the series already (Blue Wolf in Green Fire) so decided to try another to see if it was any better. It's pretty common for the first few books by an author to be a tad awkward, but then the writer improves with time (or acquires a better copy editor). Heywood did not improve. If anything, the amount of what Heywood apparently thinks is Yooperese increased. Even worse, when Heywood starts salting in the Yooperese, it's generally to signal that the character speaking with a local accent is the Upper Michigan equivalent of a dumb yokel, a redneck, or a hick. Service himself supposedly grew up in the U.P. -- he's second generation DNR; his father was a game warden in the same district Service now covers -- so why doesn't Grady himself have a regional accent?

 In any case, there are other flaws in Heywood's books. Despite his claims of having spent a lot of time talking with conservation officers and doing research in the U.P., I kept getting the feeling that the research consisted of looking at a Rand McNally and reading state park brochures. It's like the fact the U.P. is huge just doesn't register with Heywood. He has Grady living near Bark River but dropping in to the DNR office in Newberry for morning coffee and makes it sound like the two towns are a few minutes apart when they're actually separated by about 125 miles. A run up to Marquette wouldn't be quite as bad (it's only about 80 miles) but it's still not right next door. I know cops can get places faster than we mere mortals who lack sirens and flashing red and blue lights on our cars, but so far as I know even cops can't teleport.

Okay, having screwed up by selecting a book to read that I knew in advance was likely to feature an annoying amount of dialect, what did I do?

I checked out a book -- Dog On It -- that warned me up front it was going to look at the world through a dog's eyes. Why? I don't know. Maybe because it was a dog and not a cat. There are a lot of mystery writers out there who love using cats as plot devices but not many that use dogs. I was curious.

The good news? The author, Spencer Quinn, can actually write. It made the annoyance of seeing everything through the dog's eyes a little less annoying. The book was remarkably readable. Will I read any other books in what appears to be a series (all narrated by the dog)? No. Because they're narrated by the dog.

Pulitzer Project: Guard of Honor

Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 1949. When I saw it on the list, the author, James Gould Cozzens, was another writer who fell into the "I'd never heard of him before" category. Cozzens, at least according to Wikipedia, was a successful writer but had a privacy fetish that rivaled J. D. Salinger's. He eschewed publicity tours and speaking engagements; he felt his work should stand or fall on its own merits. Whether or not he would have been quite so anti-publicity if his books hadn't sold well is, of course, debatable. It's easy to have a privacy fetish when you're doing well without having to do book tours; it's a lot harder when the alternative to hawking the book is seeing it on remainder tables.

In any case, Cozzens could write. Guard of Honor is complex and multi-layered;  it is not an easy read although it is an engaging one. The action in the novel takes place over the course of three days at an Army Air Force base in Florida during World War II. The situation mirrors Cozzens' own war experience: he began by writing training manuals and eventually became a press officer. That is, he handled public relations and tried to minimize any potential bad news while playing up the good, and he did so in a position that gave him unparalleled access to what was happening with the Army Air Force. Cozzens was assigned to the staff of General "Hap" Arnold. One of the characters in the novel is a fairly close fit for Cozzens' own life: Captain Hicks has been writing training manuals but is pushing a project that falls more under the rubric of public relations.

The Wikipedia biography of Cozzens notes that he was viewed as too conservative, but I'm not sure how anyone would reach that conclusion from reading this novel. Perhaps it's apparent in his other works, but in Guard of Honor it would be hard to determine just what the author's personal biases were. Two issues that were hot topics at the time were the role of women in the military and the role of African-Americans. Both issues are themes in Guard of Honor. There's a Women's Army Corps detachment at the air base; the controllers in the tower are WACs and they're serving in other positions as well. In some scenes, the WACs are portrayed in a less than flattering light while in others the author is sympathetic to the problems they face. Similarly with the black troops, at times Cozzens allows the characters who oppose integrating the service to express their reservations but in other scenes he lays out the case for integration. One of the least likable characters in the book is a hot-headed smug Northern liberal, but he's balanced out by an equally obnoxious bigoted Southerner. If Cozzens can be labeled as a conservative, it's more likely because of his presenting various characters with moral or ethical dilemmas; he seems to prefer the characters who stick to their principles instead of opting to bend the rules in order to cover someone's ass or who claim the ends justify the means.

One thing that struck me while reading this book was that it reminded me a lot of Catch-22. Of course, Cozzens and Joseph Heller had the shared experience of having served in the Army Air Force so it's not surprising they would have formed similar opinions of the military bureaucracy.

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Yes, with a caveat. Guard of Honor is not an easy read. The structure is complicated. The reader sees events from multiple perspectives and numerous flashbacks as different characters reminisce about how they got to where they are now. This isn't a book a person can skim while sitting in a beach chair. I think it was worth the effort, but other readers may not.

Next up on the list: The Way West by A. B. Guthrie. Once again, it's a book and an author I don't recall ever hearing about before I started this project.

Another author I cannot read

Joyce Carol Oates. The woman is one of the most prolific American authors around. She's published a gazillion short stories, been featured on Oprah's Book Club, and received multiple awards. I'm not sure how I had managed to avoid knowingly reading anything by her until this week, but I had. So the last time I was at the library I decided it was time to remedy that deficiency. I checked out a recent collection of her short stories, Dear Husband.

Okay. She can write. She is really good with a pen, a master wordsmith. But depressing? Words fail me. I don't expect every book I read to be super upbeat or have a formulaic happy ending. After all, I like Russian novels. I read the short stories in The New Yorker. I even have a subscription to The Sun. But there are limits. The characters in the stories in Dear Husband don't lead lives of quiet desperation. They lead lives of such total despair that the reader finds herself wanting to join them in a warm bath while chugging a whole lot of Xanax and Jack Daniels with a nice old-fashioned cut-throat razor on the side.

You know, this baffles me. "This" being the gazillion publications. If Dear Husband is typical Joyce Carol Oates, why on earth would any reader ever buy more than one of her books? Do people think that if a book makes them feel horrible it is somehow great literature? Do they view reading as punishment, some sort of penance they endure to prove to themselves they're smart? Are they trying to impress the librarian or the Barnes and Noble cashiers when they pick up something by Joyce Carol Oates instead of Janet Evanovich? It's a mystery.

Okay. It's time to go read something light and escapist to purge the memory the Oates book. Maybe I'll re-read Crime and Punishment. After reading Oates, Dostoevsky will seem like P. G. Wodehouse in comparison.

Happy Darwin Day!

So, Mr. Darwin, have you come to any conclusions yet? 

I read The Voyage of the Beagle in high school. In retrospect, the Saxon High School library had a solid selection of classics in the sciences. I read On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection while I was a student in Saxon, too. I think I read more science in the two years I spent at Saxon High School than I did in my final two years at Hurley. Of course, that could be because the fiction selections at Saxon ran heavily to Grace Livingston Hill, James Oliver Curwood, and Zane Grey. There's only so much formulaic fiction a person can read before one reaches in desperation for some well-written nonfiction, like Origin.

Maybe I read too much

I think I'm starting off the new year reading a book I've read before. When I spotted Flash and Bones on the remainder table at Barnes and Noble back in November, I was sure it was one in the Temperance Brennan series by Kathy Reichs that I hadn't read before. Now I'm wondering if it happened to be one I managed to snag at the library almost as soon as it came out in 2011 and I just didn't remember.

I had that happen to me twice this year at the library -- I spotted a book that looked interesting, the title did not ring any bells, and then when I got into it, it was like, whoa, I have read this sucker before. The most disconcerting part was going back, checking the reading list I keep on this blog, and discovering it wasn't actually that long ago. I guess this is the curse of the fast reader. If a book is good but not great, it doesn't stick in my mind that long.

Oh well, at least it's been long enough that I'm not remembering any plot details.  I've read enough of the Bones books to know there are some predictable plot elements -- the ending for sure will involve Tempe doing something super stupid, like deciding to check out a suspect without telling anyone where she's going, because she does that in every book, but she'll survive. She has to survive. I've already read the Bones book that follows this one in the series.

Pulitzer Project: All the King's Men

The last few prize winners I've read had been, to put it kindly, duds. My expectations for All the King's Men were accordingly low. I had somehow forgotten (or never realized) that the author, Robert Penn Warren, is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. His other two prizes were for poetry. It shows.

All the King's Men flows despite -- or, more accurately, because of -- all the things the author does wrong. It's loaded with run-on sentences that should make a card carrying member of the grammar police run screaming in horror but instead mesmerize the reader. Where was his editor? How on earth did he get away with constructing paragraphs that fill pages but are essentially one long sentence that just keeps flowing and flowing until you've been sucked in like a fallen magnolia leaf being slowly but surely washed to the Gulf by an autumnal Louisiana rain? It doesn't matter. You've been sucked in, you're as trapped by Penn Warren's words as his protagonist Jack Burden was by politician Willie Stark's charisma.

All the King's Men was heavily influenced by the career of Louisiana politician Huey "Kingfish" Long. Long was a populist who was elected to the governorship of Louisiana in 1928. For generations Louisiana politics had been controlled by big money -- the oil industry, railroads, logging, sugar and cotton plantations. Long went up against them all, courted the votes of the ordinary voters, and managed to shake up the established political machine. After becoming governor, he undertook an ambitious public works program that improved roads throughout the state, constructed public hospitals, and built a new state capitol building. To the man on the street Long was a hero. To the disgruntled political operatives and business interests, of course, he was anathema. He cleaned out one political machine and replaced it with his own.

In 1930, while still serving as Governor, Long ran for and won a U.S. Senate seat from Louisiana. Even after leaving the governorship, however, Long continued to lobby the state legislature and senate to pass bills he believed in. In 1935 Long was in the state capitol building pushing for a redistricting bill. He was shot by the son-in-law of a judge who would have lost his position had the measure passed. Long died in the hospital two days later.

In All the King's Men politician Willie Stark follows a similar career trajectory with just enough differences for Penn Warren to be able to claim that although Long's story may have been an inspiration it wasn't an exact model. Long married a stenographer and had multiple children; Willie Stark marries a school teacher and has only one child. Long was elected twice to a state-wide office before winning the governorship; Stark's first political office is at the county level and doesn't last long. Long was elected to the U.S. Senate and served almost a full term before dying; Stark is gunned down while still serving as Governor.

The story overall is told from the perspective of Jack Burden, a former journalist who is asked by Stark to join his staff as an aide and researcher. Burden had trained as a historian and then worked as a reporter. When Stark wants to find people's secrets, he has Burden do the research. As Stark tells Burden, you never need to make up lies about an opponent because there is always a truth that will be more damaging:

And [Stark] said, 'Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.'  

And he told me to dig it out, dig it up, the dead cat with patches of fur still clinging to the tight, swollen, dove-gray hide. It was the proper job for me, for, as I have said, I was once a student of history. A student of history does not care what he digs out of the ash pile, the midden, the sublunary dung heap, which is the human past. He doesn't care whether it is the dead pussy or the Kohinoor diamond. So it was a proper assignment for me, an excursion into the past.

Everyone has secrets, things that they don't want the world to know. All you have to do is find out what those secrets are. Some secrets can destroy you, some secrets can set you free. The secret in All the King's Men is that even though you begin the novel thinking the story is about Willie Stark and the use and abuse of power, by the time you get to the end you know it's actually Jack Burden's story and the secrets he uncovers about his own life.

All the King's Men was made into a 1949 film starring Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark. I have not seen the film, but based on the synopsis provided by Wikipedia, the plot line of the film deviated considerably from the narrative of the book. It won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress. A 2006 version starring Sean Penn apparently followed the novel much more faithfully but flopped with the critics and the public. It more than broke even at the box office, but not by much. Although a few critics praised it, the overall consensus was that it was "agonizingly dull" and "strangely lifeless." Both are available as DVDs through Netflix; maybe if they show up as streamable movies I'll try watching one or the other.

How would I rate this book? On a scale of 1 to 10, it gets an 11. I loved the wordsmithing, the long, convoluted sentences that rolled on and on, the imagery ("the bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve"), the narrative threads and subplots twisting and coiling and turning back on themselves as one secret unfolded to reveal another. The Willie Stark story line is a straight forward one -- power corrupts and karma's a bitch -- but the structure Penn Warren built around it is remarkably complex.

Next up on the list? Tales of the South Pacific, which I know I've read before but am feeling the urge to re-read. 

I needed a good laugh

I have vented here before about some of the strange things authors do. Well, I stumbled across another howler last night. I was reading a murder mystery, Boundary Waters, by William Kent Krueger. It's part of a series set in the mythical Minnesota community of Aurora, a town that appears to be somewhere in the general vicinity of the real community of Ely, Minnesota (close to the top of the state and to the east of US-53 in the map provided below). The fictional town is close to the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area and has, like much of northern Minnesota, become popular with tourists, especially since the local Ojibwe opened a casino. There's a lot to like about the Krueger's books: they're fast paced, well-written, and have sufficient plot twists to keep a reader guessing.

I do, however, have a quibble with the author, albeit a minor one. He is really, really lousy when it comes to thinking up names for his characters. Most of the time his efforts are just sort of clunky and unnatural feeling, but a lot of authors have similar problems. I can live with something awkward. But, please, Mr. Krueger, when you're grasping for names don't just look at a state map, spot a town name, and reverse the order. I swear that every time the victim in a cold case murder got mentioned, I started laughing. "Marais Grand." Unbelievable. Oh well, at least he didn't name her "Harbors Two" or "Bay Silver."

Boundary Waters does have a real blooper in it, but it's one of those things most people won't notice or care about. The main character's ex-wife is described as being a military brat, the daughter of a woman who was single and a captain. Well, the book is set in the late 1990s, the ex-wife is somewhere around 40, so it would be impossible for her to have a mother who was career military. Getting pregnant used to be an automatic out regardless of rank or marital status. Up until the late 1970s, women could get married and stay in, but they couldn't have kids. Krueger tosses in the supposed military background as part of fleshing out the ex-wife's backstory. It would probably bother me more if I thought the ex-wife's background was going to turn into a major plot element in the series, but given that the sample chapter of the next book implied he's killing the wife off soon -- it looks like she's going to die in a plane crash -- I figure it's irrelevant. Just another small example of no matter how much research authors do, there's always going to be something they screw up.

Niche marketing in the publishing world

I discovered a new genre of fiction this week: the non-romance for menopausal women. It's like the opposite of a bodice ripper. Instead of a young heroine who spends most of the book fending off the advances of a studly cad who turns out to be a good guy, the middle-aged heroine of the non-romance spends her time remembering her love life (she gave great head), thinking about what a jerk her ex-husband is, suffering from hot flashes, and fantasizing about hot monkey sex with a seemingly nice guy who turns out to be a cad. The novel ends with the heroine lolling on the beach with a couple of female friends and agreeing that men are more trouble than they're worth, especially when there's always the adult toy store with its stock of industrial strength vibrators.

I found the book, in a word, Bizarre, but then I'm not a bitter divorcee whose spouse ran off with a pole dancer. Maybe if I were single and miserable,  I'd find a book that celebrates learning to live with the fact there are worse things than being alone a little more appealing. Then again, I'd have to be single, miserable, and "a woman of a certain age" because I'm pretty sure female readers in their 20s and 30s really don't want to read musings about vaginal dryness and chin hairs.  

Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch isn't a bad book. The writing is competent, if not great. Haywood Smith is unlikely to ever have to worry about finding space on the mantel for a National Book Award or even a Pulitzer, but she doesn't actively insult a reader's intelligence, which is more than can be said about a lot of the dreck taking up shelf space in public libraries. On the other hand, her protagonist is a remarkably shallow, materialistic woman. She spends a lot of time missing her stuff -- her $6000 coffee table, her lovely ormulu something-or-other piece of furniture, her antique Persian rug -- that she stashed with various friends back in Buckhead when her marriage fell apart. How much sympathy is the typical reader going to have for someone who sits around pining for the days when she lunched at high dollar restaurants and whiled away her hours by shopping? Or, for that matter, how much sympathy does anyone have for someone who apparently made it into the 21st century without mastering any computer skills?

I also wasn't too keen on the way the character's response to her elderly parents' problems -- her father is in the early stages of Alzheimer's -- has been to avoid going home until she suddenly needs a place to live. But even when she sees first hand how hard it's been on her mother, her initial reaction is to withdraw and feel embarrassed by her father's dementia rather than to try to figure out a way to help. The author keeps talking about what a nice person the heroine is, but, nope, that isn't how she comes across. She's nice to people outside her immediate family, the public type of nice that can be remarkably ego-stroking, but her response to family problems is Denial and Avoidance.

The character does grow, manages to develop some self-awareness and moves away a bit from being as self-centered as she starts off, but even so. . . this is not a genre of fiction that I can see myself dipping into again any time soon. I checked it out of the library thanks to the title, which does illustrate that the cover of a book makes a huge difference when the author is someone you've never heard of, but I won't be reading anything else by Haywood Smith.

This was another novel that happened to be set in an area I'm moderately familiar with. As usual, I had a few quibbles about geographic descriptions. Example: if you drive down Peachtree Industrial from the general direction of Flowery Branch (which I suspect is the real life equivalent of the Mimosa Branch of the title), you don't end up in Dunwoody. You end up in Doraville. But that's a minor quibble compared to the overall "meh" feel of the book. It's readable, but definitely not worth anyone taking the time to go looking for. If you find it sitting in a pile of free books, it's better than nothing. . . but not by much.

The Dodo, the passenger pigeon, and Palmer penmanship

There's been a fair amount of online chatter, some of it quite nasty, about Rachel Jeantel's recent testimony in the George Zimmerman trial in Florida. Ms. Jeantel admitted on the witness stand that she cannot read cursive writing. This has caused quite a few people to mock her as illiterate. Well, it's pretty obvious she's not alone.

The S.O. and I were down in Eagle River, Wisconsin, yesterday to help the now 12-year-old grandson celebrate his birthday. A fair number of his friends were there, too. Coincidentally, his mother has been going through  the kids' books in the house, some of which were purchased for Logan fairly recently and some for his older brother back in the '90s. One of the books I noticed was The Ledgerbook of Thomas Blue Eagle -- it's a book written from the perspective of a Lakota youth who ends up being shipped off to the Carlisle Indian School in the late 19th century. It's a gorgeous book, beautifully printed, and tells an interesting and heart-wrenching story. It received a Christopher Award in 1995. And here's the thing: it's printed in cursive.

It's absolutely perfect cursive, but it's cursive nonetheless. Seeing the cursive printing in the book led to us talking about Ms. Jeantel and her admission that she couldn't read cursive. So we started wondering just how common that was. We called Logan and his cronies over. The kids ranged in age from 12 to 14. Two of them admitted outright they couldn't read it, a couple could make out words if they worked at it, and one could read it fairly easily. She stumbled a few times, but she could read it. These kids are in middle school, heading into 7th and 8th grades, and they were stumbling over a book written for kids in grades 4-6.

This led to Logan's mother (aka our Oldest Daughter) mentioning that back when she worked in a restaurant a few years ago, they had trouble with some of the high school students who worked busing tables or as waitresses. If a label or an order ticket wasn't in block printing, they couldn't read it. One girl kept screwing up orders and finally admitted she couldn't read the labels on the salad dressing bottles because they were in cursive script. This solved another mystery for me: why the graphics on commercial products more and more look like they're being marketed to 6-year-olds. 

You know, I can understand not teaching penmanship in school anymore, but not teaching kids how to read cursive? That's bizarre. In a few years the government won't have to classify anything as Secret; all they'll have to do is print everything in Edwardian script.

The folly of one-upmanship in writing

I started reading Cold Days, a novel by Jim Butcher, last night. It's number 14 in his Harry Dresden series. I kind of like the character of Harry Dresden; I've read several other books in the series and I enjoyed The Dresden Files during its brief one-season run on Syfy a few years ago.

Unfortunately, I'm not overly impressed with the direction the series has taken. Butcher has fallen into the same rabbit hole that's sucked in a number of other authors in genre fiction. Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, and Janet Evanovich are the three I'm most familiar with, but I'm sure there are others. I think of it as self one-upmanship, an irrational impulse to top whatever was in the last book in a series with something that's even more shocking, unusual, terrifying, funny, or sexual. Butcher keeps introducing new totally evil and ever more powerful supernatural beings that are out to get Dresden; Hamilton has turned Anita Blake's love life into something close to an Olympic sport complete with team uniforms*; Evanovich keeps pushing the envelope on the eccentricities of her characters in an attempt to milk more cheap laughs out of her readers.

Whatever causes it -- an unwillingness to invest time or energy in doing more character development or playing too many video games where you advance from level to level -- it strikes me as evidence of a lack of some basic writing skills. An author shouldn't have to resort to cheap tricks to hold the reader's interest. Just because they're called "novels" doesn't mean an author has to try hit new levels of novelty in every work. It is possible to write novels with recurring characters who deal with variations on the same theme over and over and at the same time have the books become better and better. Most mysteries, after all, are variations on the same theme: something gets stolen or someone gets killed, and the lead character gets to figure out who did it. The mystery is what sucks you in, the various plot twists, and not one upmanship, e.g., in the last book the hero got clubbed with a baseball bat so in the next one the author's going to up the ante by having him shot.

Of course, if you're weak at coming up with a decent plot line and your characters are all rather flat, then what's left? You fall back on novelty and the equivalent of special effects, just like in a bad movie, and hope that your readers stick with you.

The readers won't, of course, but it usually takes quite a few pallet loads of remaindered books for the authors to figure that out.

[*Is Anita Blake's vagina Teflon-lined? After reading some of the sex scenes, you have to wonder how the woman can still walk, let alone go out and slay vampires.] 

A minor disappointment

A few years ago I thinned out my personal library. I'm not sure just how many books I owned, but it was a lot. I'd spent  several decades accumulating them and rarely discarded any. When the time came for the move from Omaha to Atlanta, though, the herd needed culling. I decided to get rid of any book that didn't pass the "I know I want to re-read this some day." This is a test the S.O. doesn't understand -- once he's read something, that's it. Doesn't matter how good the book was, once he's read it, he's never opening it again. I, on the other hand, enjoy going back occasionally and re-reading favorites. There are books on the shelves that are falling apart because I've worn them out through multiple readings.

Which brings me to my current reading material, A Game of Thrones. I am a huge George R. R. Martin fan. I started reading his short stories back in the '70s. Not surprisingly, I loved A Game of Thrones when I first read it back in 1996, and I've liked every other book in the series. I also like the HBO series. I've been meaning to go back and read the entire series (or what there is of it so far; Martin plans a total of seven volumes but has completed only five to date) ever since reading A Dance  with Dragons last year. Well, this week I finished everything I had checked out from the library, discovered said library is closed until December 26, so decided this would be a good time to re-read A Game of Thrones.

That's when I discovered a horrible thing has happened since 1996. Back then, once I started reading I had a hard time putting the book down. It was one of those novels where I'd start reading in early evening, get sucked into it,  and then discover the clock said 4 a.m. Now I'm having the opposite problem. The book has turned into a hard slog. Is it because seeing the series reminded me that Catelyn Stark is a stupid bitch, and I really don't care much about what happens to her or her self-centered, whining older daughter? Is it because I know Eddard Stark is going to die, and he's one of the few characters I actually like even if he is pigheadedly stupid? Who knows. The bottom line is that suddenly I'm looking at the other four volumes and wondering if hanging on to them was a mistake.

Even worse, I'm viewing the other books on the shelves, the non-Martin works, with suspicion, too. How bad was my judgement 10, 20, or 30 years ago? How disappointed am I going to be in a novel I thought was a keeper back in the '80s but turns out to be dreck now? How many books do I own that I've wasted time and energy toting around the country that could have just as easily gone to Goodwill? I'm going to try not to think about it. . .

Pulitzer Project: In This Our Life

Every so often I'll read a book and find myself mentally casting the movie, but it usually doesn't happen immediately. The 1942 Pulitzer winning novel, Ellen Glasgow's In This Our Life, was an exception. As soon as the author introduced two of the characters, it hit me: this book was a Bette Davis movie. The physical description of the younger daughter, Stanley Timberlake, just screamed Bette Davis. So did the personality of the character. Of course, it helped that the book is a classic soap opera: a family that at one time had been wealthy but is now just barely getting by; a head of household who's been married for many years to a hypochondriac that he doesn't especially like, let alone love; two sisters with radically different personalities who end up in love with the same man. Soap opera at its best.

In This Our Life  is set in the 1930s in a Virginia city not far from Washington, DC. The Timberlake family had actually come out of the Civil War in pretty good shape but by the 1930s had hit the economic skids. Asa Timberlake's grandfather had owned a tobacco factory that was doing quite well but then was somehow squeezed out by a larger firm; Asa saw the family go from being one of the wealthiest in town to his mother having to take in boarders. Unable to afford college, as a teenager Asa went to work at what had been his family's factory and was still there almost 50 years later. Despite his own penury, he had managed to marry a woman with a rich uncle. It was thanks to the uncle that the family had a decent house, among other things. At the time the novel opens, Asa's  three children are adults: his son Andrew is married with children of his own; the two girls, Roy and Stanley, live at home, although Roy is also married. Roy and her husband, Peter, are living with the Timberlakes to save money until Peter's medical practice is more solidly established.

There had apparently always been a strong sibling rivalry between the two girls. Roy is described as being a quiet brunette; Stanley is an extroverted, perky blonde. Stanley is also the spoiled one. The rich uncle dotes on her while basically ignoring her older, quieter sister, Roy. Uncle William showers Stanley with lavish gifts and even treats her to a Grand Tour of Europe after she finishes school. (Uncle William has a thing for blondes; it's mentioned in passing several times that he kept a blonde mistress in New York.) Despite being everyone's pet, Stanley is never satisfied. Anything Roy has, Stanley wants. When they were children, Stanley would snatch Roy's toys away. Now that they're adults, you guessed it -- she wants the husband. Stanley had been in Europe when Roy married Peter, but once she's back under the same roof as her sister, it doesn't take long for old patterns to resurface. The soap opera begins. Before it ends, we're treated to a jilting, an adulterous relationship, a suicide, a terminal cancer case, a fatal hit-and-run, a wrongfully accused black chauffeur (played by Ernest Anderson in the movie), and a second jilting. It must have been a blast for the actors involved in the film -- lots and lots of opportunity for scenery chewing (and Bette Davis was one of the great scenery chewers; Olivia DeHaviland, Billie Burke, and Hattie McDaniel were no slouches either).

In This Our Life definitely does not qualify as Great Literature. It's soap opera, a fine tradition in American letters but not exactly material that spawns academic dissertations or conferences devoted to the life of the author. It's competently written, albeit a bit odd in places (female characters named Roy and Stanley?), and qualifies easily as "light reading." It's the equivalent of a beach book, although its discussion of race relations and the unfairness of the justice system does introduce a serious note about society as a whole. I've no idea why the Pulitzer judges decided this was the best novel they'd seen that year. Maybe its normalcy appealed to them. The previous winner, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, has to set some sort of record for being one of the most depressing books of all time. Maybe, given the social climate (in 1942 the U.S. was embroiled in a World War) a best seller that was basically fluff held a lot of appeal. The Timberlakes have their problems, no one is really happy, but in general they're surviving.

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Probably not. It's not bad, but it does feel dated. It's better than some of the other Pulitzer winners -- I was, after all, able to finish it -- but not by much.

Next up on the list, Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair.

Summer reading

I've been on kind of a Terry Pratchett binge lately. I found a stack of Pratchett paperbacks (Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Sourcery, Pyramids, and a bunch more) in the storage shed and am discovering that reading Pratchett is akin to eating potato chips. The Discworld novels are addictive; after reading one, you end up reaching for another. And then another.

Pratchett's novels are definitely mind candy. He gets in some good satirical digs at contemporary society, but basically the novels are just plain fun to read: lots of word play and general goofiness, good humored mocking of various sword-and-sorcery and/or fantasy cliches -- one of his characters is Cohen the Barbarian, a geriatric hero who answers a question none of us ever thought to ask (What happens if heroes survive to AARP age?). In the real world, they go into politics and become governor of California; in Discworld, they drink a lot of soup because their teeth are gone.

Slight digression. I love the illustration of Discworld and wish I knew who to credit, but it was an anonymous image found through Google.